Hoyt Buck was born in Kansas about ten years before the turn of the century… the last century. As a young man Hoyt worked various jobs on a ranch and was a blacksmith apprentice. One of his tasks was to sharpen the hoes of workers, which dulled quickly. So Hoyt developed a tempering process that allowed the hoes to hold their sharp edges longer. Discovering this, he started using the process to make knife blades that would hold their edge from worn out rasps. Hoyt moved west and into a career and life that took him away from knife making until the United States entered World War II. The US government requested citizens to donate fixed blade knives to outfit the US soldiers and sailors. Hoyt didn’t have knives to donate, but he knew how to make them.
At that time he was a pastor in Mountain Home, Idaho; so he set up an anvil a forge and a grinder into a makeshift blacksmithing shop in his church’s basement and got to work making knives out of worn-out file blades for donation to the US military.
Once the war was over, Hoyt moved to San Diego and determined to start a knife company, and also determined he’d pass down his technique to his son Al, who was living in San Diego and working as a bus driver (and reluctant to leave that to make knives). It took a couple years, but soon Hoyt had his partner of choice and together they hand-made Buck knives. It was a tough learning process, and Hoyt was diagnosed with cancer within about a year of the formation of the “H.H. Buck and Son” partnership. He pushed to teach his son what he knew about knives, succeeded, and about a year after that passed away.
Eventually the company was incorporated in 1961 and got $30,000 of investment money to ramp up production from the small output they’d had prior (about 25 knives a week before the infusion of cash). Within a few years, Buck came out with a folding knife, the 110 Folding Hunter, that took the category to a new level. It became so iconic that folding, locking pocket knives are often generically called a ‘Buck knife.’ To this day the folding hunting knife is still the company’s best seller.
Today Buck knives is a US-based knife maker. Some of their knives are made overseas, but buckknives.com does a great job of marking the ‘Made in the USA’ knives and also categorizing the knives not made here as ‘imported’ in each knife’s spec sheet.
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Buck Knives 0110BRS 110 Famous Folding Hunter Knife with Genuine Leather Sheath
